Several years back, my friend Rob B. gave me a Christmas present I genuinely cherished, a pristine print of a Cop Shoot Cop gig poster from 1994 by illustrator Derek Hess. I immediately took it to be framed, and it hung on the wall of my apartment on East 12th Street from 1996 until we moved to East 9th Street in 2002.
When we moved, however, our living space went from being “my old apartment” to “our apartment.” As such, what artwork made it up onto the walls was no longer just my own snap decision. Unsurprisingly, I had a few choice pieces around our previous apartment that the Mrs. was never really that fond of. I have a massive Plasmatics poster, for example, featuring a black-eyed and scowling Wendy O. Williams that routinely put my poor wife in a foul mood. When it came time to decorate our then-new apartment (where we’ve now lived for the past twenty years … more than I’ve lived in any other space in my life), some compromises had to be made. Suffice to say, that Wendy O. poster now lives in storage. The Cop Shoot Cop poster, however, went somewhere else.
From the generosity of Rob B. to the accommodating shelter of “the other Rob,” Rob D., the Derek Hess Cop Shoot Cop poster traveled north to New London, Connecticut, where the latter Rob happily agreed to babysit some of my cherished and lovingly framed posters. Along with that C$C Hess print, he got a framed Ramones poster (Holmstrom’s art from Road to Ruin), a Stranglers promo poster (MenInBlack tour), a Clash poster (Sandinista promo), a massive poster from the Maysles’ Altamont documentary, “Gimme Shelter,” and another Cop Shoot Cop poster from a CBGB gig with the Cows circa 1990. To this day, I believe, he still has all of them (at least I hope he does).Anyway, blah blah blah … this post wasn’t supposed to be about me and my shitty "collector scum" hoarding problems. I do still have a smaller Derek Hess print … another one for Cop Shoot Cop, but a flyer … and I’ll absolutely never friggin’ part with it.
In the interim, it seems illustrator Derek Hess’ artwork has become more and more revered and no longer relegated to the “rock geek” ghetto. Check out this sprawling documentary on the man and his artwork below….
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